Bitcoin Forum

A few people have brought up the resale value of gaming cards as a reason that dedicated mining GPUs won't take off since gamers can't use them. There's some truth to that in the sense that right now, if you were building a mining rig, the ROI gap between a mining card and a gaming card isn't compelling. But, and this is important for any would be miners to understand: At it's core, cryptocurrency is and always will be a math problem.

Let's be hypothetical for a moment. Let's say that you buy a GTX 1080 today for $1000 and that in three months of mining, it pays itself off. In three more months, you've mined another $1000 of cryptocurrency and you sell the card for half of MSRP: $250. Now we math: $2000 from cryptocurrency you mined, plus $250 from reselling the card, minus the $1000 you paid gives you a net profit of $1,250. Not bad.

Now, let's say you had an alternative. For $500 you can buy a mining card that will perform just as well as the GTX 1080, but you can't resell it. At the end of six months, you've mined $2,000 in cryptocurrency, paid $500 for hardware and have a net profit of $1,500.

Which would you do?

Now, today, such a card doesn't exist. But, remember! The move from GPU mining to ASIC mining in 2014 occurred because the math made it inevitable. of course, the real world is more complicated than this example with considerations like cost of electricity, physical space, air conditioning… At the end of the day though, it's math. When the math says dedicated hardware is more profitable, professional miners will move on and the hobby miner that still wants to resell cards will either give up because they're losing money or will be few enough in number to not affect the hardware market as significantly.

I happen to think it's inevitable. When there's this much money involved, people will look for ways to increase profitability and dedicated hardware is a way to do exactly that.

One thing you forgot about is what if there is a huge mining crash and there is absolutely nothing profitable to mine because Electricity > Mining revenue.

This happened in 2014, but since there wasn't that many GPUs on the market (Only 500,000 in total) compared to now > 10-15 million GPUs. You could of easily sold the GPUs to gamers.


But right now with the 10-15 million GPUs out there. Who will buy up all these GPUs? Sure there are Gamers but PC gamers are small compared to the Xbox/PS4 community.

Hence you can't assume. I can always sell at MSRP/2

If market conditions force you to sell your hardware, that means tens of thousands of other people are in the same boat trying to do the same thing. There will be a glut of used up mining cards that nobody will pay a fair price for since the market will be flooded.